Create Complex Documents Quickly

Ibex PDF Creator is a .NET component which creates PDF files from XML data, using document layouts defined in XSL. Deployed either on your website or as part of a standalone application, Ibex helps you quickly create complex documents. Ibex provide complete control over page layout, supporting a wide range of layout features including page headers and footers, multi-column pages, page numbering, cross-referencing, footnotes, index creation and much more.

Use a Proven Standards-Based Solution

Ibex implements the W3C XSL Formatting Objects standard for creating paged documents. This standard has been in use since 2002 and provides a reliable technical solution for report and document creation. Choosing XSL-FO gives you a non-proprietary reporting system supported by many vendors across a wide range of platforms. By choosing XSL-FO now you leave yourself the freedom to change implementations or platforms in the future without having to start again from scratch.

Using a simple API your application passes Ibex XML data which is combined with a document template defined in XSL to create a PDF file which can then be saved to disk or sent to a browser.

Features include:

Comprehensive font support including support for TrueType and Type 1 (PostScript) fonts and subsetting TrueType fonts to reduce PDF file size;

Support for common image formats including BMP, JPEG, GIF, PNG and TIF and support for transparency in PNG and GIF images. The .NET version of Ibex also supports SVG images;

Fexible page layout including support multiple columns, variable headers and footers, and different page layout on each page.

Unicode support including support for Unicode surrogate characters above U+20000, full bidirectional text support and Arabic character shaping.

Ibex runs on .NET Framework versions 1.0 to 4.0 (both 32 and 64 bit) and Java 1.4 and above.

Separate Layout from Content

Ibex gives you complete separation of data from document layout. Ibex takes data from your application (as XML) and uses an XSL stylesheet which defines the page layout to create a PDF file. Changes to the document layout don't require recompiling your application.

Common layout features such as company logos and fonts can be standardised across different documents.

Integrate Ibex with Your Application

Designed for both stand-alone and server applications, Ibex is a simple way to provide your application with powerful report and document creation facilities. Ibex ships as a .NET assembly or Java JAR file which can be deployed in thick-client applications or server applications such as ASP.NET or Websphere. Ibex is fully thread safe providing a scalable server solution.

High Volume, High Performance

Ibex has been designed from the ground up to scale well. Ibex was the first commercially available XSL FO formatter for .NET and remains the most complete, scalable and high performance formatter available.

Ibex is the first formatter to use a streaming architecture, allowing massive documents to be produced without requiring huge amounts of memory. Documents can easily be created which have tens or even hundreds of thousands of pages.